Abstract: Accelerating the digital economy's development is an imperative for comprehensively advancing the modernization of forestry and an essential choice for achieving high-quality forestry development. Utilizing panel data from 278 prefecture-level cities in China spanning 2011 to 2021, this paper conducts a comprehensive assessment of the digital economy's development level and the high-quality development level of forestry. It empirically examines the impact and mechanism of the digital economy's role in enabling high-quality forestry development, along with conducting a multidimensional analysis of spatial spillover effects. The results demonstrate that digital economy progress significantly promotes the high-quality development of forestry and exhibits a positive spatial spillover effect on neighboring areas. The enabling effect of the digital economy is more pronounced in eastern and central cities, fostering the agglomeration of the forestry industry and enhancing forestry labor productivity. The synergy between the digital economy and green technology innovation positively influences this effect. To achieve these outcomes, there is a need to expedite the deep integration of the digital economy and forestry development, encourage the agglomeration of the forestry industry, facilitate the coordinated development of the digital economy and green technology innovation, implement differentiated development strategies, and propel the high-quality development of forestry.